I once came up with the notion - on the basis of an experience I don't want to go into now - that the English are perfectly happy to put up with translations of foreign books, as long as they involve one type of foreign. Once you get two sorts or more, different nationals, say, or an inhabitant of one country visiting another, things can get sticky.

On this basis, Death in Danzig is a surefire failure, because it's a novel about what happens to the Baltic city of Danzig/Gdansk after 1945, as it passed from German into Polish hands. As one population fled, another moved in, bringing with it changes in name, language, politics, culture. After the second world war, this happened all over north-eastern Europe, in the Sudetenland, in East Prussia, in Wroclaw/Breslau, in Lviv/Lvov/Lemberg.

It would be an important and an entirely salutary thing for English readers to become imaginatively acquainted with the phenomenon of mass migration. It is one of the big stories of the 20th century, and it has never quite happened here (at worst, or at best, there were Enoch Powell's rivers-of-blood speech and the pre D-Day Americans, "overpaid, oversexed, and over here"). After all, surely the point of literature in translation is to make available certain experiences one couldn't otherwise have. If nothing else, it would breed a little resistance to the vulgar threats from one's own political leaders.

Stefan Chwin is a new name to me, and Death in Danzig is his first book in English. It reminds me a little of Rushdie and Grass (himself a native of Danzig, after all), and perhaps a little more of Sebald, in the way it deploys a damaged individual at a crux of history. Hanemann - also the title of the Polish original - is a coroner, who, as the book begins, in 1945, conducts autopsies for a living. Suffering a personal loss, he becomes depressed and indifferent, gives up his profession, and, unlike the rest of the German population of Danzig, doesn't flee as the Russians close in.

Instead, a sombre, introspective type, he lives a withdrawn life in his renamed street, with new Polish neighbours, and some old memories and interests - really very like a Sebald character. The weakest part of the book is a sort of duel of two literary suicides, one Polish, one German, Witkiewicz and Kleist. This is just too ponderously indirect. Eventually, however, a compassionate if rather spindly fable is spun, in which Hanemann, Hanka, a displaced refugee, and Adam, a deaf-and-dumb child - an unlikely remake of a family, like the trio in Werner Herzog's Stroszek - are finally forced to move.

This individual story is one part of Death in Danzig. Another, even more impressive, is a collective story of nameless, or barely named, people and, still more, of objects. Some chapters are choric inventories of their mute witness to history - an aestheticisation that is somehow more tender and revealing than any dramatisation. The following rhapsodic interrogation of memory is typical: "What a succession of enamel and aluminium and cast-metal shapes! Which one had Mama used to brew her linden-blossom tea? What was on the mug in which Grandmother served us her freshly pressed apple juice? A rose leaf? A shepherdess cradling a lamb? What were the sugar cubes in when we stole them from the china cabinet? And the tea boxes? Did they have a Turkish minaret on a blue background and a note about the Dardanelles? Or was it an Indian elephant with a funny-scary, raspberry-coloured trunk?"

Presumably, all these objects are "post-German", as the term was, while Hanemann himself is an instance of a "post-German German". (The wonderfully ironic phrase is that of the poet Adam Zagajewski, who was born in 1945, the same year as Chwin's Grass- or Rushdie-like narrator; and who at the age of a few months was shunted from Lvov to Gliwice. It is used in his lovely memoir Two Cities.) Somehow, there is a peculiar feeling of griefstruck tenderness for the bourgeois period in much Polish writing; perhaps the period before 1939 really was a bourgeois apotheosis; at any rate, such a feeling characterises both Chwin and Zagajewski, and goes back to 1930s writers such as Bruno Schulz.

Chwin almost literally tells his story "in coffee spoons", from the touching moment when the narrator's parents wipe their shoes before first setting foot in their "post-German" flat, till the time a few pages from the end, when the process we have come to know as "ethnic cleansing" turns its attention to the dead, and the German cemetery is dug up. "The cemetery," Chwin's narrator notes, "was dying."

I know as a translator that one waits, often for many years, for a writer to come along who writes as beautifully as one longs to write oneself. Death in Danzig is a beautiful book, and nothing about it is more sumptuously and expressively beautiful than Philip Boehm's translation.

· Michael Hofmann's translations of Joseph Roth and Wolfgang Koeppen are published by Granta